One goal motivated Paul Kramer through his recovery after hip replacement surgery last summer: He wanted to be able to drive his Porsche 944 from his home in Orange County, California, to an ice race near Big Sky, Montana, in February. It would be no small task. That’s a 1,000-mile journey, and his 1980s-era hatchback has a stick shift that requires depressing a clutch and taxing his new hip.

“Doctors said I wouldn’t walk for a year, let alone drive a manual-transmission car,” Kramer said.

But the snowy banks of the FAT International Ice Race proved a perfectly timed incentive for the veteran rally driver. Seven months after his 15-hour operation, Kramer was eating bison sliders at elevation with 5,000 of his car friends. He and a buddy completed the road trip in a little more than two days. “I was super careful, but I’m a track junkie! I had to get here,” he said, beaming as he cradled a walking stick while balancing his plate. Nearby, spectators mingled, swirling Veuve Clicquot in their best cowboy hats and puffers, turquoise jewelry and fur boots.

The brainchild of sports-car scion Ferdi Porsche, FAT International is a winter driving party dressed up as an auto race. It’s inspired by the polar car rallies and (literally “ski driving” in Norwegian, or being pulled on skis behind a horse, dog or car) spectacles held in Europe since the 1930s. At the three-day event, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, Porsches and Bentleys fishtailed around a niveous track in the Rocky Mountains, placing these extreme supercars far afield of their natural habitats.

Single-day general admission for the inaugural race in Big Sky started at $245, and weekend VIP packages reached $3,800. More than 2,000 people attended. Tickets for the February 2027 event are on sale; a one-day general admission pass starts at $199, and VIP passes start at $1,560.

“My ultimate goal is that these events feel like the Prada fashion show,” Porsche said in the heated VIP tent. “We can’t afford that yet, but we’re getting there.”FAT is the tip of the iceberg of snow driving. Fans are paying travel agencies, manufacturers and event companies thousands of dollars for the chance to slide around on precarious surfaces most folks deliberately avoid. Some races are lighthearted, loose competitions based around timed laps; others are opulent holidays augmented with saunas and après-ski.

Either way, enthusiasts say their forays are about learning how to become better drivers and pushing their cars to the edge. Car culture has lately been boosted by millions in private equity investment and a white-hot collector market, with once-affordable classics commanding higher prices than ever. All of this has made driving in Alpine environs more appealing to owners who want to show off what they’ve got.

Roughly 12% of the 6 million car crashes annually in the US are weather-related, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Most of us don’t trust our ability to navigate in inclement conditions. So it takes a particular mentality to put a powerful sports car on ice and snow, surfaces that greatly reduce the friction, or grip, between tires and the ground.

That low traction means steering, braking and accelerating become less reliable methods for controlling the car, which, if you’re that type of person, is kind of the point. “We’re all crazy to some degree,” said Cody Bulkley, a software engineer who brought a Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X to the race, which was held an hour from Big Sky in a region called Moonlight Basin.

Options for deep-freeze driving abound, with more possibilities popping up every year. In Sweden, BMW AG’s three-night, €4,690 ($5,414) factory program allows clients to drift across frozen lakes and feel how spiked tires behave in the snow. Mercedes-AMG’s four-day driving program in Sweden (€4,500) allows guests to work with instructors on cornering with precision even in powder. Porsche AG recently opened booking for its multiple 2027 Ice Experiences in Finland.

The mostly sold-out packages, costing around €17,000, are programs ranging from 32 people divided into four groups to 48 people divided into six groups, a spokesperson says.

Although exact figures for how many holiday trippers choose to drive in snow remain elusive, the activity’s potential is enormous, says Samuel Byrne of CrossHarbor Capital Partners, who helped produce the FAT International Ice Race. “That high-end consumer is looking for something that’s very different from what they’ve had in the past,” he says.

The appetite is driven in part by those looking for an alternative to the conventional ski holiday, says Julie Hunter, co-founder and chief operating officer of HunterMoss, a luxury tour company that introduced its own Winter Ice Driving Experience in 2025. A seven-day, six-night journey, it costs €19,490 per person and includes touring Germany and Austria in luxury SUVs, plus optional skiing, spas and swirling Porsches on a purpose-built ice circuit. (Last year five people participated; this year there will be 10.)“Travelers increasingly want the atmosphere and beauty of the Alps without spending every day on the slopes,” Hunter says.

Inquiries into the experience this year are up 30%. “Ice driving offers something genuinely different.”Swishing through powder in a red Ferrari F40 is so unexpected and photogenic that it captures attention and dollars from both longtime car collectors and civilian revelers who want to watch. In the stands at the FAT race, Manhattan influencers and wristwatch hounds sat alongside serious auto brokers from Philadelphia and artists from Los Angeles to drink Champagne and eat caviar while they watched the cars circulate. Hundreds of content creators and photographers lined the garages where the cars were prepped.

“What people are looking for and what I’m trying to create are opportunities to get distracted from your phone, basically,” says Byrne, who owns the exclusive Yellowstone Club near Big Sky. “Skiing and motor sports put you in a flow state.”I asked the diehards back in Moonlight Basin why they do it; they said it’s all about the joy of the drive. “I bought the car for performance, so me being here, putting it on the ice, really gives it a research-and-design moment to see exactly what Porsche has to offer,” said Don Toliver, a rapper-singer-songwriter who raced his 911 Dakar.

“My axle took a beating, but the car did everything I wanted it to do.”The appeal has little to do with going fast, which is counterintuitive to how these whips are typically used. Rather, it’s about learning to control the machine, honing its precise balance, weight and traction so acutely that you can urge its 4,000-pound heft around an icy track with the elegance of a figure skater.

Done well, it’s a highly technical pursuit, requiring the driver to constantly adjust the weight transfer of the car by steering, braking and throttle input. Safety is a concern, of course, though the cars are more likely to have a fender bender in a snow ditch than anything more severe. None of these events pits exotics against jalopies moving at breakneck speed.

“Driving on the ice allows you to test your limits at reasonable speeds,” said Ali Javidan, the chief executive officer and founder of Range Energy and a former Tesla Inc. engineer. He was running a 1971 BMW 2002 before a tire miscalculation put it into a snowbank. The car needed some light repair; Javidan was uninjured. “It’s about knowing how much the car weighs, where the balance falls and how to compensate.”

Copious attention must indeed be paid to the tires. Those four small patches of rubber are the only connection a vehicle has with the ground, and maintaining traction spells the difference between a lovely afternoon and a night spent repairing a bumper busted on a side rail, or worse. Much of the time off-track at FAT is spent adjusting pressure and type as track conditions evolve.

“Yesterday I had snow tires on ice,” said Emelia Hartford, a prominent builder and racer who was driving a Nissan Pulsar GTI-R. “I had made the decision looking at the weather, thinking that it was going to be slush. But it was an ice surface when we went out, so being able to find some tires that had studs on them was a huge win for today.”

Aaron Guardado drove his 2023 Toyota GR Yaris from Long Beach, California, to Montana for the event. He’d tuned it specifically for the race, adjusting the suspension, brakes and tires. (The deeper into this sport you get, the more it costs; specialty tires alone can cost $2,000 a corner.)“The track surfaces got worse as the day went on, but that was more entertaining in a way, and it definitely pushed me to drive better,” Guardado said. “Anyway, I just wanted to use the car and see people smile. I didn’t come to win. I wanted to have fun.”

That’s the bottom line, really. Snow driving on any level is all a bit of a lark. Back in the main tent, Kramer found out his session had been canceled as track conditions turned muddy, but he couldn’t stop grinning. Just making it to the rally was huge. He was already planning a return trip. “It’s like Burning Man on ice, but with less drugs,” Kramer said. “I’m so happy.”